Much ado about menus

1 comment August 29th, 2008

Glenn Erickson, aka the DVD Savant, has a great column up over at Film.com discussing DVD menus and the way companies seem to deliberately try to annoy us with annoying animations, insulting anti-piracy screeds and asinine forced content. (As someone who is constantly screening Disney discs for his princess-obsessed daughter, I can agree that the Mouse is the worst offender for forced content. “Fast Play” my ass.)

Check out his column here. Glenn worked for MGM in the early days of DVD, and he’s one of the best writers on the format anywhere on the Web, so he knows of what he speaks.

In one aside, Glenn mentions that studios often hype unrelated trailers as “bonus content.” I remember back in the late 1990s, when DVD was still a pretty exotic format, that Entertainment Weekly raved about the bonus feature of foreign language audio tracks on an Arnold Schwarzenegger disc, saying it was a kick to hear the (not yet then) governator speaking Spanish. Ah, those were the days.